Currently we're serving this content from http://sstatic.net. While this works great, it means that I (sitting in Berlin) have to get my CSS from all the way across the Atlantic, because the servers that run sstatic.net are in New York.

The (main) idea of a CDN is that content should be delivered from a location as close as possible to the user, so they get their data faster.

To check if this idea lives up to its promise, I'd like to ask you to make a quick test: To measure (using Chrome dev tools, Firebug, or something similar) how long it takes to download a file from the CDN, compared to downloading it directly from us.

Oh, and since we have a lot of devs/server-admins here.... TURN OFF FIDDLER / WIRESHARK / ETC. Not that I would make such an elementary mistake... cough.
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Marc Gravell♦May 6 '11 at 8:40

4

It might be worth noting, for anyone doing this test, that if you're using Google DNS (or any other unusual DNS provider that's not related to you by geography), your results will be skewed.
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Adrian PetrescuMay 6 '11 at 17:53

@Tom well, it's twice the distance from NY. (Although I don't know how much is down to that, and how much is down to router hardware, rusty intertubes, stopping for the panoramic view in Hawaii etc.)
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PëkkaMay 6 '11 at 8:45

The traceroute results for each are fairly consistent. Running the original test again, I see the CDN clocking in closer to 280 ms total, sstatic remains the same, and the latency for both remains the same.

This may be my ISP's fault. We went through a time when they were apparently routing traffic through a server in Louisiana, causing Google and all the other "auto-detect-your-location" pages to determine that we simply did not live anywhere in Texas. If they're doing the same sort of silliness, that may explain why I'm getting routed to a CDN server that is more geographically less convenient for my location.

Singapore

sstatic: 245ms latency, 807ms total
CDN: 214ms latency, 630ms total

Firebug does report some weird results for the CDN, with latency ranging from 220ms to 472ms averaging 363ms (number reported for CDN taken from Chrome, whose number seems more consistent). The amount of time taken receiving the file is the approximately the same at around 420ms though